Charity Can't Feed the Poor

I THINK OF the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas as the Wenceslas Season. Carols fill the air and appeals to help feed the hungry fill the mails.

Like the trusty page, enlisted by the good king to carry food and fuel through the snow to a hungry peasant, we are asked to donate canned goods, to subsidize a meal, to serve dinner at a soup kitchen. And we respond.

Groping for an antidote to the overwhelming commercialism of the season, hoping to show our children the "true meaning of Christmas," or looking for a way to ward off loneliness on the most familial day of the year, we head down to the soup kitchen or the food pantry to help out.

In fact, so many of us respond that volunteer managers complain about a "Christmas bulge" -- not a few extra pounds from seasonal overeating, but a sudden flood of short-term helpers who act out a contemporary version of the Wenceslas story. Meanwhile, emergency food programs struggle to meet the need for food 365 days a year.

Hunger is not a seasonal phenomenon, although it may be especially poignant at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when popular culture plays up images of feast and abundance. In fact, food pantry managers report that demand rises in the summer, when poor households with children can no longer rely upon the school lunch program to provide part of the week's nourishment.

Hunger is not a romantic opportunity to demonstrate good will on earth. Hunger is a grim day-to-day reality for people whose incomes are too small to meet their basic needs, whose wages are too low, whose public assistance is inadequate or has been terminated, whose shelter costs are excessive, whose poor health interferes with work or necessitates large expenditures.

Hunger is a byproduct of our mounting inequality. In an abundantly supplied society like our own, hunger is essentially a political issue. It is rooted in dislocations in the economy and failures of public policy, in an excessive reliance on the market and an inadequate social safety net that fails to provide the minimum guarantee any industrial, or post-industrial, society needs.

It takes gritty, unpopular struggle to maintain and improve the public safety net, but charity is more fun. It makes us feel better about ourselves and allows us to enjoy our own privilege and surfeit with less guilt. It eases the discomfort we feel about hunger in the midst of plenty, without unduly inconveniencing us.

Charity creates an illusion of safety, reassuring us that no one will starve. It conceals the inadequacy of the gift compared to the need. Intention prevails over effect. And food charities, the ones that claim our attention so effectively at this time of year, are especially seductive.

They reinforce the erroneous idea that we can solve hunger without addressing the underlying causes of poverty. And food charities are logistically demanding, diverting the time and effort of many of the people most concerned about poverty to loading docks and storage capacity, walk-in freezers and commercial stoves.

The historical King Wenceslas, the one whose statue towers over Prague's Wenceslas Square, tried to bring a measure of justice to 10th century Bohemia, curbing the privileges of the nobles and upholding the rights of the poor. Unfortunately, he was assassinated by associates of his broth er, Bolesaw, who took the throne and restored the privileges of the rich.

I like to imagine that the king was diverted from his political agenda by the sorts of charitable activities depicted in the "Good King Wenceslas" carol. Exhausted by the logistical demands of hauling food, wine and fire wood through the snow, he was unable to deal decisively with reactionary forces and got himself killed. He ended up a martyr and a saint. The poor of Bohemia ended up poorer and hungrier than ever. This is the Wenceslas Syndrome, the substitution of charity for politics. It characterizes not only individuals, but whole societies.

The Wenceslas Syndrome may serve to provide some of the well fed -- and some of the hungry -- with a merrier Christmas, but it won't solve the problem of hunger in the richest nation on earth, or create the sort of society in which we all have a place at the table.